Promotion

Update: The young Miss Marple?

It's not something you expect to hear but it looks like the story of Miss Marple, the elderly lady detective from the pen of Agatha Christie, is set to receive a film treatment, however in the good looking world of Hollywood it seems hard for them to swallow the concept of an aging lead female character and so they're going to take the character back thirty years.

The casting for the lead character has been announced and while I love the actress behind the role I do find myself scratching my head and wondering what Disney are attempting to do with the story and what Miss Marple is going to lose.

So who have they chosen for the new character? The lovely and talented Jennifer Garner. She's a mere thirty-eight, almost thirty-nine, the youngest Miss Marple ever, some seventeen years behind Angela Lansbury, and she looks so damned gorgeous and young. Hardly Miss Marple.

Disney are set to reboot the character with a young actress in the role, according to Deadline. The idea of Miss Marple being the older, interfering old lady is gone and that leads me to wonder what this new Miss Marple is going to be, just another female detective? It certainly looks like that and everything that makes Marple so interesting is going to be gone.

Losing the core aspect of the character is going to lose what differentiates this character from all the other on screen detectives. Mind you with Jennifer Garner playing her, she'll never have looked so good.

Update: It seems that the deal to make Jennifer Garner the new, young version of Miss Marple might not be as cast iron as we thought as Deadline turns up to turnaround its own story. Although she's still being cast it seems that the company that has the rights to the Agatha Christie character haven't signed a deal yet.

I wonder if they will quite frankly. The aging English detective being transformed to a Texan beauty of perfection doesn't seem like it's going to have any connection with the original work, so why would the sign off the rights to a film that has nothing to do with their character? Surely they could just go off and make a detective series with Garner without any need for the Miss Marple story?